Doesn’t Joyce Bawa Mogtari Know that Cousin Mahama Is the Biggest Thief Among Ghanaian Politicians?

The Akan have a saying for thievish and shameless self-righteous political scumbags like the twice-defeated, one-term former President John “European Airbus Payola” Dramani Mahama and his co-called Special Cousin and Aide Mrs. Joyce Bawa Mogtari. It goes as follows: “Doer, by all means, Cover Up Your Own Acts of Moral and Criminal Depravity and Expose the Foibles of Your Neighbors and Fellow Truckers.” In the popular Ghanaian Highlife hit song, the crooner poetically and succinctly adds: “How about You, Dear Doer? Trust Me: You Are Exactly the Same as the One You Are So Smugly and Self-Righteously accusing of Wrongdoing.”

She may very well have cleverly and conveniently forgotten this post-Mahama defeat adamant insistence by the latter of being allowed to ride roughshod over the laws of our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, by being allowed to keep the official residence of the Vice-President which his immediate predecessor and namesake, the late Mr. or Alhaji Aliu Mahama, occupied for 8 of some of the most successful years in Fourth Republican Ghanaian political history, as Vice-President and the official and loyal right-hand man of former President John “The Gentle Giant” Agyekum-Kufuor, from 2001 to 2009, before passing the same onto his aforementioned immediate successor.

That is how brazenly thievish and kleptocratic Okogufuo Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja is. And Ghanaians had better prepare for more adamantly mischievous and kleptocratic attempts to have our commonwealth literally snatched from us, should we make the politically and civically outrageous and downright fatal mistake of returning the Mahama and the Asiedu-Nketia Gang of Robber-Barons to Jubilee House come January 7, 2025, or thereabouts. You see, contrary to what the Cousin Mahama-appointed former Deputy Road Transport Minister would have the rest of us bona fide members of the Global Ghanaian Community (GGC) believe, stealing is not only when a cabinet minister or an executive appointee or senior public servant illegally and criminally keeps stacks and caches of hard currency or liquid cash in his or her private vault at home, especially one that entails monies that obviously appear not to be all their own or one that could not be readily accounted for because the protagonist is not officially known to own businesses or properties that would have enabled them to make such vast amounts of hard currency or liquid cash.

Stealing or willful thievery or thievishness also comes in the form of the kind of thuggish scenario of unwarranted acquisition of wealth such as Mr. Dramani Mahama’s nefarious attempt to cannibalize or commandeer the official residence of the Vice-President of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana, in the wake of the seismic defeat of the former John Evans Atta-Mills’ Arch-Lieutenant at the hands of the now-President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the indomitable twice-defeated Presidential Nominee of the presently ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) who, by the way, is widely believed by many avid Ghanaian watchers and pundits of Fourth-Republican politics to have handily won the December 2012 Presidential Election, including “Lt-Col” Johnson “The Mosquito” Asiedu-Nketia, the equally kleptocratic Chief Kingmaker of Okogufuo Yagbonwura Kwame Gonja. There is some element of emotionally and psychological anal-retentive sort of Freudian immaturity here, of course, one that the present discursive purview does not permit us to extensively delve into.

Then also, we have on readily accessible record the fact that a then Vice-President Dramani Mahama once publicly and glibly confessed to a reporter from the globally renowned and ubiquitous British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) that the Bole-Bamboi native, from the Akufo-Addo-created Savannah Region, was promiscuously on the take insofar as payola solicitation was concerned. Which is why it comes as absolutely nothing short of despicably absurd for the former President to have been one of the first key players on Ghana’s political scene to have self-righteously jumped onto the morally greasy wagon of the most acerbic and caustic critics of the recently resigned Minister of Sanitation and Water Resources, Ms. Cecilia Abena Dapaah, in the wake of the massive fallout of viral social and traditional media reports that Ms. Dapaah and her husband had, sometime last year, filed a criminal complaint against a couple of household helps whom the couple had employed, involving the theft of some huge sums of money in different currency denominations amounting to several millions of American dollars.

It is scandalously and despicably absurd because it was the very key operatives of the Chairman Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress, the self-proclaimed pontifical Apostles of Probity, Accountability, Transparency and Justice who, even as the then Chief Justice Georgina Theodora Wood-presided Supreme Court of Ghana (SCOG) authoritatively attested, not very long ago, pioneered the sort of official thievishness that is presently being associated with Ms. Cecilia Abena Dapaah and her husband as well (See “Minister’s Stolen Money: They Have Millions of Dollars, Cedis under Their Beds as Ghanaians Suffer – Bawa Mogtari” Modernghana.com 7/21/23).

As those of us who were old enough at the time vividly recall, it was National Democratic Congress’ stalwarts like the late Prof. Kofi Awoonor, Dr. Kwabena Adjei and Dr. Obed Yao Asamoah, during the democratically elected tenure of the late President Rawlings, who were first widely reported by the media to have filed criminal reports and complaints with personnel of the Ghana Police Service (GPS) involving huge sums of money, largely US Dollars, that these “gentlemen” kept “under their beds,” in the colorfully sarcastic words of the Triplets-Pumping Baby-Making Machine so-called Mahama Special Aide, Mrs. Joyce Bawa Mogtari. We must also highlight the fact that long before the foregoing “gentlemen” reported their fellow thievish houseboys and butlers to the police, the infamous Apostles of Probity, Accountability, Transparency and Justice had already established the hitherto unprecedented precedent of literally cannibalizing State-Owned Real-Estate Properties on the cheap.

Naturally, Yours Sincerely or Sincerely Yours may have left out the names of several other Apostles of Probity and Accountability as a result of the time-weathering mnemonic erasure or the vagaries and the corrosive atrophy of memory with the passage of time. Else, tell me, Dear Reader, how could Yours Sincerely have so easily forgotten the Master-Sergeant – some would even say the Field Marshall – of this “Revolutionary” Brigade of Domestic Bankers of Stolen Ghanaian Taxpayer? We are here, of course, referring to none other than the rambunctious and the stentorian sharp-toothed baby from the North-Tongu Constituency, in the Not-Akufo-Addo-Created Volta Region. Togbui Agbogbomefia Okudzeto-Agorkoli-Ablakwa-The-Oneth!

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
July 23, 2023
E-mail: okoampaahoofekwame@gmail.com

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